Just close the thread, nothing of value in here, nothing of value lost, etc. Don't waste your time.
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I've been doing a lot of evaluation lately on how I spend time, the value I get out of how I spend my time, etc. Call it a midlife re-evaluation or something, since I've past 40, and while I still have plenty I care to get done, there's more and more that I simply don't care for anymore, and most of my interaction with the internet is in the second category - it's... a thing I do, but I can't exactly explain why other than "It's been a thing I've done, so I ought to keep doing it." Which, of course, is the sunk cost fallacy.
But, beyond that... I look around this place and I just don't recognize it. I've been a member for... some long while, almost a decade, and read a lot before I joined. It used to be an interesting, refreshing place, because it was against the consumer defaults. Facepunches abounded. If you asked something stupid, you got plenty of replies telling you that, and suggesting some standard cliches about bicycles, but they weren't wrong either in many of the cases. And it was a major influence in me deciding to work out ebikes for commuting, which worked better in Seattle than anything else, it's certainly shaped how I think about things, and I like to think that era is a major reason why I was able to reject "expanding my life to fit my income" and just live more simply. My wife, certainly, is better at that than I am, and serves as a useful counterweight to some of my wasteful spending tendencies.
Lately? I've been in and out erratically for periods of time, but I just don't recognize the place anymore. Consumer Sukka Central is what I see, over and over. Car's broken? Well, there are deals on new cars! You deserve it. Consumer electronics, life, spending... the place is just mainline now. "I want to spend money, help me justify it!" There's none of the old scrappiness and sharp edged debate that used to make the forum fun. I'll toss it in every now and then, but I feel like the lone voice in the wilderness more and more, saying "Turn your fucking lights off!" and "Fix your fucking car, it's a 100k mile Toyota, it's not end of life."
But more than that, I've concluded that consumer tech is just a dead end trap. Whatever the promises of it in the 90s, or the early 2000s, it's turned into something else in the last decade. A lot of people have recognized it, I'm a bit slow on the uptake there, probably because a lot of my life was connected with it somehow. It's piles of broken complexity on top of piles of broken complexity on top of an environmental disaster.
Modern phones are just attention vampires - they've been weaponized against us, to make us "eyeballs" to "monetize" with "impressions." After having collected all of our data, or whatever wasn't nailed down, to attempt to figure out how to best manipulate us to align with the goals of whoever's paying best for that capability. The ways to interact with them can be reduced to the point that they're not doing anything particularly evil (mostly), and... at that point, what's the point? It bugs me greatly how hard it is to live without a smartphone these days, and I say that having spent a year trying with KaiOS and a Flip IV. Would still be using it, but the hardware failed - I could no longer text without constant corrections, and even dialing phone #s was getting erratic as the keypad died. Texting is still how a lot of stuff is coordinated, so I need something, but... it can live on the counter.
The same goes for modern computers. Windows 11, as being discussed elsewhere recently, is something resembling a train wreck that obsoleted a whole crapton of perfectly good computers because the OEMs pressured Microsoft. The requirements are nonsensical on the face in many cases (this processor, well, unless it's a Microsoft Surface that shipped last year with an older one, so that particular system is stlil supported) and you can get around them without any real issues, but it's an OS fundamentally designed to collect your data and deliver ads to you - remember back in the beta when Explorer locked up because of a bad ad blob delivered by Microsoft? That's how fundamentally tied advertising is to Windows 11. We're heading for the Idiocracy TV, when a tiny bit of content is locked up in tons of advertising - again, to manipulate our attention and to attempt to make humans into profitably predictable little consumers. Fuck. That.
And it goes on and on. A modern flagship game is a high cost purchase for a game that then tries to addict you into buying more. It's Vegas, in your pocket, or on your TV, or computer. Yay? It can't be a complete and functional game, because then how will you drive people nuts to spend more?
I'm pretty sure modern LED lighting will eventually be determined to be nicely nasty for humans too - the blue it puts out (even the white ones - they're blue LEDs with some phosphor to shift some of the color energy around) is squarely in the chunk of spectrum humans use to determine that it's daytime (the blue suppresses melatonin production), so... yay, we've made homes that are impossible to sleep in.
And so it goes, and goes.
And I think I need to be done with the modern, digital, consumer tech ecosystem. I still work in the space, but that sort of crap needs to be contained better to just that space. I've been heading this way in stages, and in various hops and skips over the last 5 years, but it's come to a head, and I think the internet, even the useful corners like this, just needs to go back to the little box we kept it in during the 90s and early 2000s, when it wasn't everywhere, and it hadn't been weaponized against human attention like it is now.
So, I think I drop back to my little niche corner, go publish only with my blog for project documentation, and shake loose an awful lot of formerly wasted time to go work in the analog spaces that make up the interesting bits of reality.
Any lingering advice is simple: Use less energy, do your own solar, and fix your damned car. Preferably doing all of these yourself.
So long and thanks for all the fish!
